They say the pen is mightier than the sword but so far in this life of mine I have yet to kick someone’s ass with a Google Doc. If you fantasize about twisting your affinity for words into more traditional combat, the creator of Universal Paperclips has just the game for you. Blending together the fundamentals of Scrabble, tower defense strategy games and some roguelike seasoning, Towers of Babble is perfect for the logophile looking for a more bespoke Scribblenauts.
Each campaign in Towers of Babble begins with a handful of letter tiles. Spell a noun and you can build a unit on the map. Like larvae in an anthill, words are predeterminedly assigned to harvesters or defensive units. Spell out verbs and modifiers to create power-ups for your nouns. Use your harvested resources to purchase upgrades, such as a larger selection of tiles or adding premium stats to certain letters. Survive enough waves of enemies and you’ll have conquered the level, itself assigned to a new word, and can carry over certain elements to your next struggle session.
Created by alternative indie dev Frank Lantz, best known for the absurdist industrial simulator Universal Paperclips, Towers of Babble boasts 120,000 levels and some 200,000 word units to choose from. Many words have loose affiliations to their definitions. The semiotics conjure its own form of magic, imbuing units with healing elements, poison clouds of chip damage, stronger shields, bigger blasting super missiles. Compounding words together into long-winded, Germanic strings of nonsense. While each “Librarian” plays alone, they fight this war together. Each conquered word contributes to the same massive tower. What happens when each is cleared, and this lexicon reaches the heavens, is anyone’s guess.
As a strategy game, Babble isn’t the fiercest. There are many different kinds of maps that demand different approaches and a variety of enemy types. But attack patterns are often predictable throughout. I found it pretty easy to win fights before anyone’s lips even touch the bugle. That said, messing around and seeing where your personal lingo goes is a ton of fun. Like Scribblenauts before it, half the charm is plugging letters in just to see how the game decides to manifest them. Because all of us here, readers, writers, we got this word thing down. Good at word stuff. Really good.
